Protecting yourself from the cloud

We all love Gmail as well as Google’s tendency to keep things running as smoothly as possible. But snafus do happen; all that data is stored in “the cloud” on Google servers in what some consider the most state-of-the-art, redundant and reliable network of data centers located all over the globe.  Your personal data is syncing with out a hitch.  After all, if you can’t rely on what is arguably the largest, most talent rich of cloud providers in the world, who can you rely on?

A quick Google search — yes, I understand the irony — reveals that there are plenty of people, who, like you and many other Android users, thought that their data was safe with Google – only to find that their sense of security was false.  With just a little planning, research and sweat, you can avoid a similar fate and further protect your data.

Kevin Wright goes on to detail his process:

I own a small hosting and web design/consulting business and rent server resources from a data center.  On that server, I have installed getmail along with a few custom configuration files based on those described by Googler Matt Cutts‘ blog posting. The files tell getmail where to pull my email from; in this case, from the Gmail servers, using a secure IMAP connection.  Each config file also tells getmail which folders to retrieve from (eg. “Inbox”, “[Google Mail]/All Mail”, “[Google Mail]/Sent Mail”, etc.);, to only get “unseen” messages; and in which format to store the messages, if not Maildir, then the native Gmail format, Mbox. Getmail runs every hour from a cron job and stores all new messages in the format of my choice: Maildir on my server.  The mail is then encrypted and backed up nightly with all my other data on an off-site server using Duplicity.

I know, I know… not everyone has a shiny tin foil hat like mine that reads “Caution: Geek Below!”  That does not excuse you from protecting your data.  There are many more less intense, more GUI based options to protect yourself.  Here are just a few:

• Gmail Backup
• Backing Up Gmail with Thunderbird Using IMAP
• BackupMyMail
• IMAP

The peace of mind and security you’ll get from backing up is worth the few minutes, is it not?

[Source DroidDog]